BibliophileBullpen

worth reading • Ephemera blog has an interview with manuscript collector Ivo Meisner from Book Den East, Martha’s Vineyard.

naughty naughty • even Harry isn’t immune to the rampant book thefts, 3000 copies of Fantastic Beasts and Quidditch Through the Ages were lift from a UK loading dock. I’d start with the guy driving the forklift.

blog of note • Book Patrol has a post about the vanishing of mid-price books from the internet market. oh there still there, they just cost $3 bucks now.

worth reading • from the Guardian a feature on Edith Wharton’s love affair with France.

waking the dead • scholars may have found the grave of Mona Lisa. oh fer crissakes leave the poor woman alone, she’s dead.

dystopia alert • an AP rundown on Turkeys war against writers and journalists.

cookies • Alibris awards three libraries with collection development book grants.

banktoaster• from Madlyn’s Blom’s Old Bag Lady blog, a post about e-audiobooks and where to get em.

site to see – In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road, Kerouac’s love letter to Denver (the original manuscript is currently on display at the Central Public Library), Westword, the Denver alternative weekly has put up an interactive literary map of Denver.

cookies • SF Bookworm blog is keeping up with the New Awards season with BSFA Awards Shortlist and the 2006 Preliminary Nebula Awards Ballot

chekovia • ReadySteadyBook blog gave me the heads up about 201 Stories by Chekov webpage.

calendar
1870 – H. H. Munro (”Saki”) is born in Burma. (d.1916)
1892 - The first performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is held at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.
1907 – Christopher Fry, English dramatist is born (d. 2005)
1939 - Michael Moorcock, British author is born.
1946 – Damon Runyon’s ashes are scattered over Broadway by Eddie Rickenbacker flying overhead in large transport plane.
1966 - Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas airs for 1st time on CBS - here’s an interactive coloring game from Seussville.com

site to see • BibliOdyssey blog has an incredible must see collection of book images depicting people on stilts.

worth reading • Michael Lieberman’s Book Patrol blog has a delicious bookseller manifesto post that includes a thumbnail field guide to bookseller species. Sadly I did not find myself on it. 8(

talking heads • the Ephemera Blog has an interview with Susan Tucker is the co-editor of book The Scrapbook in American Life

something new • Still another book review of The Way It Wasn’t- from the Files of James Laughlin edited by Barbara Epler and Daniel Javitch but this one is by WAPO’s Michael Dirda.

worth reading • SFgate’s Ilan Stephans follows the provenance of a piece from the Growing up Latino anthology only to discover it hasn’t one.

It seems internet replication is altering many things we thought we knew by heart. Yesterday I found that the Groucho Marx quote: “I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the other room and read a book.” has been altered through internet replication into: ” I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.” - am I the only one who finds this deeply disturbing?

cookies • from NPR, Two of France’s most prestigious book awards have gone to American Jonathan Littell for his first serious novel : Les Bienveillantes or The Kindly Ones. The hugely popular novel written as a memoir by a former SS officer who leads a hidden life in a French town, is written in French.

DIY • I haven’t had to make a catalog quality shot of a book in a long time buy you may. So look carefully at this $99 Photo Studio in a Box, now go make one of your own – translucent paper? table tripod? photofloods? a box? come on what every happened to ingenuity? Personally I use clip-on aluminum worklights with photofloods, but I plug them into a power strip, and then step on the off/on switch only when I need to shoot and then turn it off. Nothing overheats and I haven’t spent a ton of money.

I was up all night with a very sick 8 week old kitten and this morning’s vet bill was $200. So, I suddenly and miraculously found myself with a boat load of new energy. I spent the rest of the day cataloging books and creating a lot of new images for the Bullpen Cafe Press store. I added dark colored t-shirts, more blank journals and book bags and a some really nifty images of famous authors on postage stamps. More will be coming as I scan more into the PC. Check it out. Please feel free to request something. Designs made from US postage stamps since ‘78 or copyrighted images are not eligible.

calendar •
1876 - In an article for the Atlanta Constitution, Joel Chandler Harris first uses the pseudonym Uncle Remus.

1966 -Truman Capote throws a landmark party, his Black-and-White Masked Ball, at New York’s Plaza Hotel, inviting a who’s-who of personages from the world of entertainment, politics, literature, and art. Truman always claimed he invited 500 of his friends and made 15,000 enemies.

birthdays •
1628 - John Bunyan is born (d.1688)
1757 – William Blake, British poet and artist (d. 1827)
1881 - Stefan Zweig, Austrian writer (d. 1942)
1896 - Dawn Powell, American writer (d. 1965)
1907 - Alberto Moravia, Italian writer (d. 1990)
1915 -Yves Theriault is born (d 1983)
1944 - Rita Mae Brown is born.

cookies • Novels by William Boyd, Neil Griffiths, Mark Haddon and David Mitchell are all up for newly renamed Costa Book Awards (neé the Whitbread Prize)

small world • Bulgaria will seek to join the European digital library in 2007 and the World Digital library in 2008. Over 6 million copies of books, periodicals, archive documents, photos, maps, music and films will be accessible at the European Digital Library via Internet by 2010.

btw • The late great Spalding Gray’s Monster in a Box monologue was released today on DVD for $11. This is the story of Gray’s attempt to write a novel. In his first person account of writing and living, and dealing with success while trying to be successful. YOU WANT THIS.

cookies • Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist won the first Pergola Award conferred by Mexican booksellers.

better late • Three century old occult book Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum (1719) by German Alchemist Georg von Welling has finally been translated from 18th century German into English.

skoobe • The Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books, a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of old Hebrew texts announced that over 11,000 old Hebrew books and other works of Judaica are freely available and fully searchable (including in the original Hebrew) online at the Society’s website, www.hebrewbooks.org.

*SEE? i told you I was gonna start making up my own holidays.

calendar •
1841 – 1st date in James Clavell’s novel Tai-Pan

1862 – On meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, President Abraham Lincoln remarked “So, this is the little lady who made the big war.” yeah, like it was all HER fault.

1864 - Lewis Carroll sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Alice Liddell as an early Christmas Present.

1865 - Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll published in US

1928 - Philip Barry’s Holiday, premieres in New York City

site worth seeing • Complete text of Alice in Wonderland complete with Arthur Rackham illustrations. (via Artpassion who also sells such as posters)

lost n’found • Yale’s long missing Lewis Carroll letter found on eBay and recovered. The seller claims the chain of custody wound through our unsuspecting friends at Whitlock Farm Booksellers.

mitzvah • Retired journalist Roger Mudd has donated his 1,500 volume collection of 20th-century Southern writers to Washington and Lee University,

worth hearing • from NPR Talk of the Nation spends an hour mulling over the question “What is a classic?”, in honor of the Everyman’s Library 100th anniversary

cookies • The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced yesterday that James Gunn will be honored as the next Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master. (via Sci Fi Bookworm)

banktoaster • another timewaster - Scribble, a flash game where you draw lines to keep the blots from falling to their death.

event • the Salon International de la Bibliophile, will be held for the first time in Brussels from Dec 7-10. Via Rare Book Review blog.

calendar •
1621 – John Donne gets elected Dean of St Pauls
1914 - Jean Cocteau is rejected for military service as physically unfit.
1916 - Jack London commits suicide at 40 in Santa Rosa, CA – Ford Maddox Ford remarks “like Peter Pan he never grew up and he lived his own stores with such intensity that he ended up believing them himself.”

birthdays •
1819 – George Eliot, British novelist (d. 1880)
1869 – André Gide, French writer and Nobel laureate (d. 1951)
1888 – Tarzan, the 8th Duke of Greystoke, is born.
1936 - James Burke, British writer
1947 - Valerie Wilson Wesley, American author

cookies • Russian author wins US$113,000 literary award for biography of Pasternak

worth hearing • from NPR Novelist Robert Harris compares events in ancient Rome to some current US events.

super shopping • Three private collections of rare works by Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope have fetched about £100,000 at auction in Dorset.

worth reading • from the Guardian, columnist Kathryn Hughes debates the age old question of how many books is too many?

today’s excuse • My stress has been manifesting as physical aliments, nausea, vomiting, back ache, migraines. Dealing with my mother gives me stress. Ergo my mother makes me ill. As well as the stream of agency reps, that have been arriving to assess my mother’s mental health. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

events •
30th Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair (ABAA) November 17-19, Boston MA
The Boston Book, Print and Ephemera Show, at the Radisson Hotel November 18, Boston MA

calendar •
1835 – Charles Darwin’s voyage published in Cambridge Philosophical Society
1849 - Fyodor Dostoevsky is sentenced to death as a socialist agitator; the sentence will be commuted to four years’ hard labor in Siberia.

birthdays •
1889 - George S. Kaufman, American playwright (d. 1961)
1922 - José Saramago, Portuguese writer is born, Nobel laureate
1930 - Chinua Achebe is born in Ogidi, Nigeria

audio • from NPR – A group of writers has collected more than 800 fading landscape terms in a new book – Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. Their hope is to keep words such as “kiss tank” and “lover’s leap” from going extinct.

mitzvah • In recognition of all our disabled military veterans, Baen Books will provide its books to fans who are blind, paralyzed, or dyslexic, or are amputees, in electronic form free of charge, effective immediately. Many Baen authors are veterans themselves, using a military setting as the setting of their tales. Right now convalescing vets might welcome an exciting, fast-action tale to pass the time.

burn baby burn • Libraries find graphic novels under assault

cookies • The Echo Maker by Richard Powers won the National Book Award for fiction and The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan won for nonfiction.

blog of note • Jeremy Dibbell of Philobiblos has been very productive lately, posting lots of yummy things, that I wish I had gotten to first.

* DAMN . . . I missed Clean out Your Fridge day.

more later . . . Ma’s in surgery right now . . .

events •
1756 - Giacomo Casanova, in prison on charges of being a magician, makes a spectacular escape & makes his way to Paris, where he introduces the lottery in 1757 & makes a name for himself among the aristocracy.
1892 - Arthur Conan Doyle publishes The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
1905 -The producer & players of Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession are arrested, NY.
1913 - Historians Will and Ariel Durant 27 and 15 are married in New York’s City Hall.
1917 - Eugene O’Neill 1-act play In the Zone premiers, NY.
1921 - Beginning date of the Poundian calendar, designed by poet Ezra Pound
1921 - James Joyce writes the last words of his novel Ulysses.
1922 - Karl Capek play The World We Live In opens in NY.
1947 - Bertolt Brecht, having fled Nazi Germany years ago, now flees the US during the American witchhunts.
1958 -Writer Boris Pasternak is expelled from the Soviet Union.
Halloween

birthdays •
1724 – Christopher Anstey (d. 1805) English writer and poet.
1795 - John Keats, (d 1821) renowned British lyric poet, is born in a stable his father managed in Finsbury Pavement.
1920 - Dick Francis is born, Wales. Mystery novelist – Queen’s jockey

back again . . . . My Ma is up and talking, well no . . . technically she is actually sleeping now. But I have been up with her since about 7 am so my day is getting a really really slow start. I’m am curled up with my laptop, a nice Mexican horror movie and a nice bottle of port (from Australia no less, who knew?)

idiot video alert • Some Arkansans who apparently have their head up their ass, want to have Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 banned from their schools curriculum. I guess they read the words in the book, but just didn’t understand them.

banktoaster • the new issue of Artists Book News is available for downloading as a PDF.

suits off the rack • The French publishers union, Le Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE), has joined book publisher Le Martiniere Groupe in its copyright suit against Google.

cookies • Japanese author Haruki Murakami was in Prague to receive the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize.

something new • Robert Fagles new translation of Virgil’s the Aeneid to hit shelves tomorrow.

diy • Arizona Republic’s Barbara Yost gives step by step instructions on how to produce a customer on-off gift cookbook using Kodak’s Kodakgallery.com

something else new • John Updike reviews Norton’s Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the New Yorker.

worth reading • Ira Joel Haber has posted a good post about books you buy on faith.

Sorry folks. I had a touch of food poisoning which laid me out for 2 days, and that kicked off a super migraine which kept me horizontal with a jackhammer in my head for another day.

birthdays •
1818 - Ivan Turgenev, Russian writer born
1903 - Evelyn Waugh, English writer born
1938 - Anne Perry, English-born novelist born

events •
LA – Louisiana Book Festival – Baton Rouge
LA - New Orleans Bookfair – New Orleans
NJ - Princeton Antiquarian Book Fair – Lawrenceville
TX - 2006 Texas Book Festival – Austin

great blue hope • U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, promoting his latest book at the Texas Book Festival, got a rock star’s reception Saturday at a venue that’s usually much less welcoming of Democrats: the Texas Capitol. Personally, I like him for one reason – he’s articulate, that puts him way ahead of most politicians, celebrities, journos and bloggers.

naughty naughty • South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was assaulted at home in Johannesburg by three men who locked her in a store room and robbed her of cash and jewellery – she was unharmed.

audio •
from NPR John McChesney discusses how Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ still resonates after 50 years.

from NPR Susan Stamberg Gathering Poems from Carl Sandburg’s ‘Great Period’

obit of note • Theodore Taylor at 85, author of the Cay.

talking head • from the Miami Herald a piece about young adult fantasist Tamora Pierce.

cookies • Welsh novelist Rachel Trezise is first winner of £60,000 Dylan Thomas award the UK’s highest-paying and restricted to work by writers under 30

birthday boy – 1925 - Elmore Leonard, American novelist - Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing.

worth reading • Hugh Hollowell of Downtown Books Blog gives a misguided youth a verbal throttling – when he confuses a place to hang out afterwork with a real bookstore.

cookies • Al Gore’s book Inconvenient Truth has been honored at the second Quill Book Awards. The Event will be broadcast on November 28th on NBC. ’bout flipping time.

dystopia watch • A small group of Australian students gathered outside the Baillieu library to protest against the federal government’s sedition laws and the banning of two books.

well worth reading • from Boston Globe’s Alex Beam instucts on the delicate art of not reading a book.

cool tools • Google’s merged their Spreadsheets product with Writely into the beginnings of an online office suite called Google Docs. i am such a Web 2.0 slut.

audio • from NPR – Jenny Allen, a journalist, and her husband, cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer, have collaborated on their first literary effort, an illustrated book for adults: The Long Chalkboard

something new • also from NPR John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction – The Innocent Man

banktoaster • Flylady.net has a fascinating piece on how to declutter your house in 15 minutes a day. 15 mniutes, just think – i am not sure she means a booksellers house. that would be like 20 – 25.

6 of one • Marginal revolution blog has a marvelous thread about 6 word micro-short shorts : Hemingway’s was “For sale, baby shoes. Never used.”

optional • from NPR San Francisco Chronicle’s Jon Carroll adds his 2 cents to the This I Believe series, with a piece on failure.